What are the effects of word-by-word predictability on sentence processing times during the natural reading of a text? Although information complexity metrics such as surprisal and entropy reduction have been useful in addressing this question, these metrics tend to be estimated using computational language models, which require some degree of commitment to a particular theory of language processing. Taking a different approach, this study implemented a large-scale cumulative cloze task to collect word-by-word predictability data for 40 passages and compute surprisal (...) and entropy reduction values in a theory-neutral manner. A separate group of participants read the same texts while their eye movements were recorded. Results showed that increases in surprisal and entropy reduction were both associated with increases in reading times. Furthermore, these effects did not depend on the global difficulty of the text. The findings suggest that surprisal and entropy reduction independently contribute to variation in reading times, as these metrics seem to capture different aspects of lexical predictability. (shrink)
This satire has often been accounted a poor poem, repetitive, irrelevant and self-indulgent. Rather than recover one more cultured display of refinement as disguise, this essay explores instead the fall-out that radiates from a classic text's play with the ‘loose talk’ of plebeian gossip. The proposal here is that Horace and his intimates could, and can, easily share a view of the view of ‘their’ populace, but at the price of surrendering control over the import of their intervention. This claim (...) turns on the figure ‘Brutus’, which noises a republican politics of resistance to tyranny through what linguists term nonphonation: as we shall find, Horace both tells a dummy tale about ‘przemilczenie’ and at the same time performs a dumbshow of his own. (shrink)
Bringing it all back home,Odysseyxxiv holds an encounter with narration in the relative calm of Laertes' garden, a final and significant retrospection and re-narration of narrative. Always ‘une mise en scène du Père’, Narrative invites us to relive with Odysseus the ‘inferential walk’ on which his father once took him through the trees of his childhood. We explore with and through him the force of narration in forming his life-story. Of the signs that persuade father to recognize son, the scar (...) on Odysseus’ thigh has sutured healthy readings; the fruit-trees in Laertes’ orchard have scarcely picked their weight. This essay explores the sign of the trees, beginning with its interaction with the scar, as the staging of an exemplary model of cultural/narrative productivity. (shrink)
Ovid's two versions of his encounter with a woman at the races in the Circus Maximus are re-read together as celebrations of the spectacle of the spectators in the arena. The analytical approaches of "Everyday Life" collage and "Foucauldian panopticism" structure are shown to "over-achieve." Ovid dramatizes personal politics at the Circus in a sustained display of the self-reflexive poetics of erotic metaphor. When elegiac amor is acted out as a race, victory and favor are eroticized, steering between crude explicitness (...) and bland circumlocution, into an expert triumph of sexual asymmetry. Ovid finds a version of femineus amor which brings his poem to a climax, and a climax to his poem, in spite of public decency and myriad spectators. Every quirk, routine, or landmark of the ludi circenses, including the parade of the gods, is included as a challenge for Ovid's poetic chariot, another lap in the race-or another race, re-run according to a fresh strategy. Re-playing the meta-literary terms of poetic genre, Amores 3.2 gives an "epinician" turn to Amores 3, playing games on Callimachean strategies for re-starting a work on a new lap. (shrink)
John Henderson explores three letters of Seneca describing visits to Roman villas, and surveys the whole collection to show how these villas work as designs for contrasting lives. Seneca's own place is ageing drastically; a recent Epicurean's paradise is a seductive oasis away from the dangers of Nero's Rome; once a fortress of the dour Rome of yesteryear, the legendary Scipio's lair was now a shrine to the old morality: Seneca revels in its primitive bath-house, dark and cramped, before exploring (...) the garden with the present owner. Seneca brings the philosophical epistle to Latin literature, creating models for moralizing which feature self-criticism, parody and re-animated myth. Virgil and Horace come in for rough handling, as the Latin moralist wrests ethical practice and writing away from Greek gurus and texts, and into critical thinking within a Roman context. Here is powerful teaching on metaphor and translation, on self-transformation and cultural tradition. (shrink)
This satire has often been accounted a poor poem, repetitive, irrelevant and self-indulgent. Rather than recover one more cultured display of refinement as disguise, this essay explores instead the fall-out that radiates from a classic text's play with the ‘loose talk’ of plebeian gossip. The proposal here is that Horace and his intimates could, and can, easily share a view of the view of ‘their’ populace, but at the price of surrendering control over the import of their intervention. This claim (...) turns on the figure ‘Brutus’, which noises a republican politics of resistance to tyranny through what linguists term nonphonation: as we shall find, Horace both tells a dummy tale about ‘przemilczenie’ and at the same time performs a dumbshow of his own. (shrink)
